Tag Archives: outdoors

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Last on the card: hot

The cover picture is from the hike with my daughter at Beaver Creek, last on my Panasonic.

This is from my cell phone and cracked me up. 19 Crimes and Martha Stewart?

And for our song track, we’ll have another Martha: Martha and the Vandellas, from 1963. Fabulous!

For Brian’s Last on the Card.

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Masks and selfs

I call a friend yesterday and sing, “Happy Day Before Your Birthday to You”. It sounds silly. She has just gotten Covid and this cheers her up.

She is telling me about her summer and about a class at a camp. Some for adults and some for children, but one where people really dropped their masks and just got to be themselves.

What identity is your deepest self? She is talking about her nine year old self. I think mine is more like four and rebellious and skeptical of adults, adulthood and all of their rules. I don’t think I am ever out of touch with this identity, though I don’t let it talk out loud in clinic. Mostly. A rebellious four year old informed by medical school and years of experience is a pretty frightening thought, isn’t it? Or the basis for a great cartoon.

That part of me is very observant and quite smart. It does not care what we are supposed to see or the cues people give. Growing up in an alcohol household, it looks for what people do not say. This can be terribly helpful in clinic and also a bit weird. It is body language and tone of voice and what questions a person shies away from answering and the puzzle pieces that do not fit.

Last week I see a small child with her parents for vomiting and coughing and fever. I am interviewing the child and asking if things hurt. “Do your ears hurt?” I ask. She shakes her head no. I point to my throat next and she nods. Yes, that part hurts. Her toes do not. I include toes or something silly to find out if the child is saying yes to all of it. I tell the parents that we will do a strep test, that mostly people don’t cough with strep except when they do. The strep is positive. My medical assistant grumbles, “They didn’t tell me that,” but I think the parents were more worried about the vomiting and she may not have complained about her throat.

Are the masks we wear always bad? I don’t think so. I think it is frustrating if we believe our mask or never ever get to drop it. There is some formality to my role in clinic and I tend to get more formal when I am worried about someone. That has been interpreted as anger or brusqueness, but it isn’t. I am wearing a real mask with all patients because we are seeing at least one person with Covid every week. The literal mask does not help me connect with people, but sometimes I can anyhow. I have to take it off for the 90 year olds because most of them are hard of hearing and lip reading helps.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: identity.

I hiked the Beaver Brook Trail this weekend with my daughter.

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Sisyphus

Sometimes clinic feels a bit like Sisyphus must feel. Rolling the stone of illness up the hill but it is eternally rolling back down. I can’t stop it. People age and people die and otherwise there would be no room for young ones.

The last two weeks of clinic has worn me out a bit. A friend says that I take too much of it home, worrying about people. How to let go of this?

I make connections in clinic. Not all the time. Sometimes I fail. I made a connection with more than one person with diabetes this week, but one was funny. The connection is that he mentioned that he is an elk hunter. Oh, and flies to California to fish and has a very lot of fish. I said that I’ve had elk and like it. That was when the connection engaged: he was very pleased that I am not horrified by hunting. Hunting elk is not at all easy or cheap and cleaning the animal and carrying it out, well. He is coming back about his diabetes and left cheerful.

If I go home trailing those connections and spend my time worrying about this people, I’ll wear out. I don’t want pneumonia number five. So how do I connect but let it go when I go home?

I will think of the connection as much smaller than the boulder that Sisyphus deals will. Not a boulder. A small piece of the rock. I can suggest how the person can lighten the load a little. Then I must stand aside and let them go. They have to decide what to do about their health. It is between them and the Beloved, they can try what I say or not.

Now it is not a boulder that I am trying to keep from rolling down a mountain. Each person has their own mountain to climb in their life, their own habits and histories, good or bad, trailing them like Marley’s Ghost in A Christmas Carol. I can suggest a tool to loosen a link of diabetes, or a slightly different trail up the mountain. Then it is up to them. I can’t carry them and should not carry them. Maybe they are approaching a patch of scree and I can suggest an easier or safer path. And then stand aside, stand down, let the people go.

Now I am not pushing a huge rock. I am standing on my own mountain, quiet, and looking at the path behind. I am resting a little and on my own path. I don’t know what will be around the next bend in the path. But I love the mountain and the forests and the birds and the ocean. All of it.

Thank you, oh Best Beloved.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: olympics!

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Volcanic fire

A friend and I travel to Hawaii in March 2018. The lava in the caldera had dropped on the volcano and the road around it was closed because of the gases. The changing eruption happened over the next few months. We found a place to wait for nightfall to take photographs. It is way more dramatic in the night, isn’t it? We could see fire rising up in the day too, but at night the smoke is lit up as well by the lava below. A scene on fire, beautiful and terrifying.

The smoke from forest fires has dissipated in Grand Junction. I stayed mostly inside for a few days, which is not hard on work days. The clothes I wear are backwards from the ones I wear on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. There I have a windbreaker and layers for outside and I think my heat pump has had the air conditioning on once ever. Here I need the warmer clothes for the air conditioned inside. I get cold at work by lunch time and go outside to warm up! Very strange.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fire.

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Wheels and gears

Ah, wheels! These photographs are from the Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Festival, from October 2023. All of the machines are human powered and have to go on land, up a big hill, be able to brake, go through water (the Port Townsend Bay is COLD) and through a mud bog at the fair grounds! They have to have a theme, bribes for the judges, support teams (usually on bikes), a teddy bear on board and I think duct tape is required too.

It is three days of costumes, physical work pedaling the human powered machines, a parade, a dance, a Kinetic Kween, a brake test and the challenging trip through the water, the race itself (most mediocre wins) and the mud bog. There are many wheels involved and quite a lot of fabric and glitter. Some machines are thoroughly engineered and others involve more duct tape and improvised floatation attachments.

It is the Pacific Northwest, so there might be giant slugs too. Are there wheels involved in this tail or not?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: wheel.

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Talk

Today I will interview people in clinic, but yesterday I hiked alone. Well, no, not really alone. I spot movement and freeze. A silent interview of this rabbit, with the help of my zoom camera. There was a very young bunny further on, about 6 inches long, who hid behind a bush a year from me. I did not want to scare her, so did not get a photograph.

Lizards and crows, too. Chipmunks and a squirrel who was noisy until she realizes that I have spotted her in the small tree, barely taller than me.

I climbed the Serpent’s Trail which is an old road. It goes up and up but is never terribly steep. At the top, I can see the haze: smoke from forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and Canada is coming down. When I got home I closed up the house to keep the air cleaner. It is smokey today with lots of small particulates, not good. We will see more asthma, allergies, eye problems, emphysema and the smoke makes people headachey and irritable. I hope it doesn’t sit in the Grand Valley for a long time.

Meanwhile, the bunnies and the crows and the lizards and the squirrels, can’t go inside, can they?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: interview.

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Many stripes

Yesterday I hiked Echo Canyon in the Colorado National Monument. The first part is a shared hike, with the Devil’s Kitchen Trail, No Thoroughfare Canyon Trail and Old Gordon Trail. Old Gordon and Echo split off and then they split.

I did not start hiking until ten yesterday and it was already heating up. Echo Canyon is partly shady, once I am in the canyon. The rocks are gorgeous and there is a plethora of stripes. How beautiful!

At the head of the canyon and all through it, you can see where water carves. It would be amazing to see this waterfall, but since there are flood bits in the tops of trees, it is probably way too dangerous.

There is a pool at the base now and there was a small stream above ground in part of the canyon and a swampy bit.

And am I seeing faces?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: plethora.

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Intimacy

What IS intimacy? And what is love? And are they the same thing? Do you have to be intimate to love someone? Not meaning sex, but what level of intimacy is “normal” and “appropriate”?

I am thinking of my mother. When I was just starting college, she started talking to me about my father and about his drinking. I became more and more uncomfortable and finally asked her to find a counselor or someone other than me. The thing is, she refused to DO anything about his drinking and in fact, covered it up. The two of them would scream at each other at 2 am and fight when I was in high school. It would wake me up and I would think, I wish they wouldn’t, because I have school tomorrow. But I certainly didn’t go say anything because then they would have screamed at me. And as I got older, I wondered if my mother was drinking heavily too. Because why would she argue with someone drunk at 2 am, that makes no sense. Unless she either was drunk or loved to argue or both.

It is clear that she was drinking heavily at that time from her journals. Over and over she writes, I drank too much last night. Hard to blame her for not intervening with my father if she is drunk too. But she was using him as her cover up. Her family blamed him. My grandmother, her mother, didn’t blame him. She loved them both.

When we had guests, my mother would turn on the charm. She could mesmerize a room and entertain people with stories. My sister and I and others would be the butt of the stories. My father too. After the guest left, she would often talk about them. Analyze them. Talk about their faults and weaknesses. I was fascinated but a bit horrified too. She seemed to like these people so much and to charm them and invite them back, but was talking about them behind their backs. Ick.

So intimacy interests me. I wonder how to do it “right”. Maybe right is not the best word. How to do it “functionally”. I really don’t know what normal is, my maternal family certainly did not model healthy intimacy. My generation still gossips about each other. I quit that at age 19 and refused to be part of it. I don’t think anyone saw my rebellion except my maternal grandmother. She did not say a word but I knew that I had her respect. She did not play the family game with me.

I don’t think that gossip and triangulation are a good form of intimacy or love. Person A talks to person C about person B. Word gets around and sometimes it is person D that says something to person B and person B gets upset when they realize where this came from. And how twisted and one sided the story is. And aren’t we seeing this play out on a national level? All these people saying that THEY KNOW the status of the President’s memory. I don’t. I can’t judge it from a debate. And frankly, if we are going to do a psychiatric evaluation of one, I think we have to do BOTH. Stop following stupid rumors. Why not require a neuropsychiatric evaluation on every candidate for President and Senate and House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. And make them public. That would cause some chaos, wouldn’t it? And how do you decide who is “sane” enough to govern?

I think that gossip and triangulation is a dysfunctional form of intimacy. People feel closer when someone is whispering a secret to them. I don’t think it’s healthy. It might be normal for our culture, though. Normal does not mean healthy, after all. What do you think?

This election is like a bad hallucination. Why do we accept candidates that behave badly? Are we so addicted to television and movie drama that we want it to happen in our government? I don’t. How about you?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hallucination.